January 2nd 2024.
Placing the plate of cut up toast and peanut butter in front of my toddler, I catch a glimpse of my phone from the corner of my eye. It briefly lights up before going dark again. But, given that it’s 6am, I can’t imagine it’s anything urgent. Despite this, I reach for my mobile, curious, and then 256 WhatsApp notifications appear before me. With bleary eyes, and a surge of anxiety, I delete the notifications – after realising none are, indeed, urgent – and place my phone, face down, on the counter where it will now stay for a few hours.
I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve woken to a tidal wave of texts, but it’s not. In fact, a recent count put me as a member of 189 WhatsApp groups. Admittedly over 100 of these have lain dormant for a while and I simply have been too lazy to go to the bother of exiting and then deleting them. However, that doesn’t stop the messages from coming.
My partner and I both have parents who are separated, which doubles the family groups we have. And then there are groups with different line-ups of friends; my own ones, my partner’s, or a blend of both. And since becoming a mother, the overwhelm of my inbox has become even more intense.
Admittedly, until recently, I was the person creating these groups. Now I share groups with local mums and parents, nursery parents and, if you can believe it, other attendees of a children’s birthday party my son and I will be going to later in the year. It’s too much, which is exactly why I am trying to make my phone a less interesting place. Or rather a place that demands less of my attention.
So far, this has included putting my phone ‘to bed’ at 7pm in the kitchen when my son goes to sleep and buying a cheap digital clock for our room, as I found the notifications on my screen became too much of a draw if I woke in the night, as parents of little ones so often do. It’s only been a month or two, but this has made a huge impact on any sense of connection I felt to my little handheld device. Before it was with me almost all of the time, never switched off and perched on the nightstand next to me as I slept. I openly admit that I have struggled with phone addiction in the past.
I have also spent a lot of time deleting the apps that I would normally trawl through in a zombie-like state of partial awareness — like Instagram and X. Deleting these has massively helped, but there is one app that I have to completely overhaul my relationship with: WhatsApp. The tyranny of WhatsApp groups has started to tip me over the edge. Far too often they are places in which two notifications can quickly turn into 250 – as evidenced by that bleary eyed breakfast.
Like the one named ‘Mexico’ to set up a holiday that never quite left the ground, or one simply named ‘stretch tents’ as part of our wedding organisation. And then there are multiple stag and hen do groups that happened half a decade ago and for some reason still live on in my inbox. And I’ve already started quietly sliding out of some of the groups I feel I’ve drifted from or friends I haven’t spoken to for a while. I don’t intend to make a big show of my exits, but over the next few weeks, I’m having an early spring clean of my inbox. It’s time.
Ideally, I’d love to become one of those people who loftily replies to messages a few days later. If I could, I’d delete the whole thing and go analogue, but I can’t quite bring myself to cut myself off completely. For these precious years of my children’s lives in particular, I want to spend as much of it being as present as I can.
Here’s hoping that removing these groups will make my phone a less busy place and one that draws my attention away less. Whatever happens, I know reducing the amount of areas in which my attention can be split can only be a good thing.
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